REVIEWS IN BRIEF

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 12, 2003

The old mystics had it easy. They wrote in an atmosphere of belief, with a dramatic intensity that would now have you labeled mad. Today it is hard to write personally about God and the spiritual without being trite or sentimental.

These essays by novelists, poets, environmentalists and scientists struggle with this problem. One approach is to start with the personal anecdote, then pull out to the general point -- about the nature of God. It can be the stuff of a bad sermon, but Andre Dubus makes it work. After a hit-and-run accident, Dubus rages over his crippled legs as he makes sandwiches for his daughters. Physical devastation emphasizes the physicality of the sacraments: God manifested as Christ who "ate and drank and s-- and suffered." Sandwich making becomes another sacrament.

Easier perhaps is to write about God as revealed through nature -- here Greg McNamee uses mountains, Pattiann Rogers rain, Barry Lopez tundra. The scientists in the collection go even further in naturalizing God. Physicist Chet Raymo doesn't believe in immaterial souls -- awe of the inexorable life burning unseen in a meadow is enough. The religious instinct is part of our genetic essence for sociobiologist E.O. Wilson. This may give an empirical base to religion but eliminates a personal God.

Quite right, argues Cynthia Ozick. A personal God is created in our own image; to love it is idolatrous. So don't even try to describe the indescribable. To make a likeness of God is to break the Second Commandment -- and virtually all these contributors are guilty.